Nosferatutu … or Bleeding at the Ballet

Griffin’s first independent show for the year opens with blood on the floor. 

Vampire Nosferatutu is driven by an urge centuries-old to dance ballet and just can’t resist chewing into dancer Brandyn Kaczmarczyk when he steps out to do a solo Swan Lake.  

Backed by Steven Kreamer’s agile three handed orchestra, the rest of this mad cabaret is Nosferatutu struggling alone to dance the classic, and share his ample collapse of self-worth.

Whippersnipper thin, white-faced and hairless, the kohl-eyed Tommy Bradson is necessarily enigmatic, a Monster of Asperger angst.

Kaczmarczyk gargles blood from the corner and the “usher”, Sheridan Harbridge, who also directs, is later recruited, but these parts are under-written. This is Bradson’s show; he wrote it as well.

His monologing wit and lively tangents, as Bradson hurtles through strobes and smoke across Alexander Berlage’s cabaret set, is an inventive crazy entertainment nicely spiked with attitude and naughtiness.  Snippets of engaging songs steal from forlorn French ballads or spoof musicals, pop and opera. 

I like my comedy dark and dry but for me Bradson, while engaging to watch, didn’t turn his slap stick into ongoing laughter.  His script and its wandering narrative needed far more editing, ideas and development.

But as a creation, his character of Nosferatutu is a welcome reincarnation of that pantheon of Lindsay Kemp and Cabaret Conspiracy who astounded us around Darlinghurst in decades past.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Lucy Parakhina